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"An excellent choice, sir," nodded the head waiter in the extremely elegant restaurant of the even more elegant "Reads" hotel on Mallorca. He was referring to the three-course menu he had ordered, which contained nothing out of the ordinary and whose choice did not really need any special praise. But I could probably have ordered any other offer on the menu without the maître d' refraining from this surely memorised phrase. Although - who knows? He might have bowed to the floor and muttered "it's a wonderful idea, my lord" when I ordered five courses. And, after ordering a seven-course meal, he would have risen to an "absolutely fabulous, Your Grace". Well, at least if I had asked for caviar and champagne.

Champagne with chocolate dessert - why not

Admittedly, these are assumptions that couldn't be proven that evening, because my cash reserves weren't enough for fish eggs. The three courses were already priced high enough - and the steep prices of the wine selection spoiled my mood a bit more. With difficulty, I found a local red wine in the thick but largely content-poor wine book that was in the "just affordable" range. Because I didn't order any of the ultra-expensive mainland Spanish wines or any prestige champagne, the sommelier probably didn't comment on my request with a single syllable, but disappeared wordlessly towards the cellar. The wine was really good, all right, and it didn't have to be "excellent", "wonderful" or "fabulous". But at least it should have been enough for a "nice" or a "why not", I thought after some thought. By the way, ordering champagne on Mallorca would generally not be a good idea. Firstly, there are a (small) handful of very decent local sparkling wines on the island, secondly, many bars offer all kinds of Catalan cavas, and thirdly, even the simplest standard cuvées from Reims or Épernay are priced so mercilessly high that even waiter headstands would not encourage ordering.

The Chef de Cave from Veuve Clicquot tastes

If you want to enjoy champagne at a reasonable price with your meal, it's best to travel to the place where it was made, i.e. Champagne. Although you can also experience your sparkling wonder there. Until a few weeks ago, there was no wine bar in the whole of Reims where you can taste several varieties Schampus by the glass (this has probably not changed until today), and at the table in the first hotel in Ambonnay I asked in vain for a good winegrower's champagne from Egly-Ouriet, the local cult winegrower - instead, standard cuvées from the big houses were boring on the bottle list. Why weren't more local producers represented, I wanted to know. "We have so many vintners here," was the blasé explanation. One prefers to reach for the mineral water.

Which sparkling wine should one choose? The author at work...

You may hear more stupid remarks if you choose a mature Wilhelmshof sparkling wine or something similar and don't want it to be understood as an aperitif, but want to drink it with your meal. "You really don't want any red wine afterwards?" is what you hear then, for example. No, damn it, otherwise I would have said that. It is not yet generally known how well champagne or other sparkling wines can be combined with fish, with poultry, even with red meat. Nor has the fact that good sparkling wines are not necessarily served in a simple champagne glass. Try forcing the host of an average Michelin-starred restaurant to pour the mature sparkling Assmannshäuser Höllenberg from Schloss Vaux (with game with cranberries!) or a 1999 Bollinger (with roast saumagen with chestnut sauerkraut!) into a voluminous white or even red wine glass! Something is obviously resisting in the depths of many restaurateurs' hearts. We don't really need to write about decanting sparkling wine into carafes at this point. Only the cleverest wine waiters come up with these ideas; everyone else cries out in horror and mumbles something about the loss of carbonic acid. That's right - but no one is asking you to leave a champagne open for hours, it's usually only a matter of a few minutes in which little CO2 is lost but a lot of flavour is added. At least when it comes to high-quality, very complex, possibly too young sparklers. By the way, it is by no means necessary to open such rarities with a sabre in the manner of the wild French. The so-called sabering serves at best as a show for garden parties, leads to the loss of considerable amounts of the bottle's contents and is regularly practised only outdoors. (The only sabre event in my tasting career in which the wine manager of a restaurant deviated from this rule took place in Dubai and, contrary to expectations, did not damage the restaurant's equipment. But Dubai is Dubai, and the rooms here are bigger than elsewhere anyway...)

Champagne bottles can also be opened with a sabre...

"Did you like it?", the owner of the Reads Hotel, a distinguished Brit with a dog, called after me personally after I left his hotel, somewhat full and rather broke. I answered yes. On the one hand, it was really good - from the wonderful olive oil to the great fish to the delicate, albeit rather small portioned dessert. On the other hand, I was just too cowardly to mention the mediocre, servile to inattentive service, which diminished more and more as the evening went on, culminating in the fact that no restaurant manager or sommelier was there to see us off and wish us another "Good bye, sir". I didn't mention the overpriced champagne on the boring wine list either. Deep down in my subconscious I had the feeling that the boss would not understand me in this respect...

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